Accepting Bilingualism in English-speaking Canada, Testing the Limits of the Official Languages Policy in the Federal Public Service, 1962-1972 By Norman Moyer Submitted to the Faculty of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the MA degree in History November, 2014 © Norman Moyer, Ottawa, Canada, 2014 1 Abstract This work is concerned with the way that official bilingualism emerged as a part of English-Canadian values in the 1960s. Much of this work is about the effort in the 1960s to change the federal public service from a stronghold of English-speaking Canada to an organisation where English-speaking and French-speaking Canadians could work in their own language on an equal footing. The archival records of the Professional Institute of the Public Service provide detailed insight into this change and the resistance to it. It is the thesis of this work that the adaptation to official bilingualism in the Public Service of Canada played a key role in setting English-speaking attitudes to bilingualism. The struggle to define and impose official bilingualism in the federal public service was a testing ground for the evolution of bilingualism in English-speaking Canada as a whole. As much of English- speaking Canada accepted the value of bilingualism in principle, the public service worked out the practical ramifications of this culture change. The result was a slow and only partial progress toward effective bilingualism in the federal public service and in Canada as a whole. 2 Acknowledgements I want first to acknowledge the inspiration and guidance of Professor Michael Behiels who fed and shaped my enthusiasm for a return to the great topic of English- French relations in Canada in the 1960s. In addition I want to recognise the leadership of Professor’s Damien-Claude Bélanger, Serge Durflinger and Pierre Anctil who replaced Michael Behiels after his retirement and who pushed me to develop and express my thoughts within the rigorous discipline of the professional historian. Whatever the success of the final product, I have learned a great deal from the comments and suggestions of each of these professors. I want also to acknowledge the assistance of the librarians and archivists at Library and Archives Canada who are still succeeding, within the desperate constraints of budget cuts, to hold and make available so much of the documentation necessary to the study of history in Canada. I wish for them that the Government of Canada will soon be convinced of the need to reinvest in this essential part of our heritage. Finally, let me thank colleagues, friends and family who have suffered from my long absences in libraries or before the computer. It is a strange retirement they would say. My wife and friend Sylvie has not only been a key part of my long affair with bilingualism, she helped with her ideas and memories of Ottawa in the 1960s. I will be sure to consult you all before I take on any more such adventures. 3 Preface Preparing a thesis on a topic and time that I have known has some unique advantages and challenges. Undoubtedly, it provides me with knowledge that is useful in understanding the issues. Equally certainly, it runs the risk of falling prey to my own biases and selective perceptions. I have tried to be aware of this danger and have used the work of many other more experienced historians to keep me on track. In spite of these efforts to triangulate objectivity, I believe that the best way to prepare a reader for my work is to provide a thumbnail sketch of my own background. This work deals with a time and I topic that I have known well all my life. I was a high school student in Beamsville, Ontario, at the opening of the 1960s. I had grown up in Loyalist Canada. My early sympathies lay with the Upper-Canadians who had fought the War of 1812 along the same pathways and gullies that I followed to school. My tendencies were High Tory and I thought that ‘The Family Compact’ an altogether better social framework than the rebellion proposed by William Lyon Mackenzie. I had little knowledge of any part of Canada further away than the Canadian National Exhibition in Toronto. I remember Victoria Days more than Dominion Days, the passage of Princess Elizabeth through my village more than the visit of any Canadian politician. From 1964 to 1967 I studied history at Trent University where T.H.B. Symons was President and my tutor. I regretted the passing of the Red Ensign as much as any young Tory at that time. By 1970, I was a Foreign Service Officer in the Department of External Affairs. I had accepted the political neutrality of the public servant, although my views still lined 4 up somewhere between Red Tory and NDP. I had by then been exposed to many of the regions and cultures which make up Canada and I had become modestly bilingual. Later in my career (1996-2005) I managed the Official Languages Program and Multiculturalism Program as Assistant-Deputy Minister, Canadian Identity, in the Department of Canadian Heritage. In that job I got to know and appreciate even more the complex fabric of Canadian society. I dealt daily with the political, social, cultural dynamics of Canadian unity. I defended the positions of the Government on Canadian diversity and I shared a sense of pride in the Canadian model of pluralism. The work in this thesis is certainly infected by the enthusiasm for bilingualism and multiculturalism which my job and my personal life have provided. Those who judge Canadian society today and find that it is still under the spell of certain of its WASP pretensions may not be able to see as well as I can how far we have moved from the old British-Canada of my youth. Societies do not change quickly or in a constant progression. They zig-zag; they crawl forward and they fall back. Sometimes they retreat into a fearful dark age where old ‘verities’ shove aside new learning and new evidence. The Canada that I examine here has progressed and I have been lucky enough to share in and at times add to that progression. 5 Table of Contents Abstract…………………………………………………………………………….…..2 Acknowledgements……………………………………………………………………..3 Preface…………….……………………………………………………………………4 Table of Contents………………………………………………………………….........6 Introduction……………………………………………………………………………..7 Chapter One: ‘Speak White” and the Prelude to Compromise ………………………41 Chapter Two: What kind of Canada? ..............................................................................81 Chapter Three: Stumbling Toward Official Bilingualism ……………………………143 Conclusion…………………………………………………………………………….182 Bibliography…………………………………………………………………………..191 6 Accepting Bilingualism in English-speaking Canada, Testing the Limits of the Official Languages Policy in the Federal Public Service, 1962-1972 “Oh bless the continuous stutter Of the word being made into flesh”……..Leonard Cohen1 Introduction When it was created in 1963, the terms of reference of the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism (RCBB) started from a seemingly simple proposition, “…to develop the Canadian Confederation on the basis of an equal partnership between the two founding races…”2 In the Canadian context this proposition was anything but simple. Canada had not developed on the basis of an equal partnership between its English-speaking and French-speaking peoples. The dominance of the English-speaking population in numbers, territory, economic and political clout had been clear for at least 100 years. By the 1960s, French-speaking Canadians, particularly those in Québec, were 1 Leonard Cohen, ‘The Window’ from Recent Songs album 1979. 2 Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism, Final Report, Volume 3 (Ottawa: Queen’s Printer, 1969), 351. 7 making it obvious that this domination was no longer acceptable; English-speaking Canada would have to change or face the separation of Québec. The RCBB was a major part of the effort to help English-speaking Canadians realise that a new larger place would have to be made for French-speaking Canadians in Canada. As the 1960s advanced, bilingualism became a central part in this new partnership both because of its symbolic equating of the two cultures and because of its practical effect in allowing French- speaking Canadians more effective access to their federal government and the broader society of Canada. The imposition of bilingualism in the Public Service of Canada would become the most practical and visible demonstration of the new partnership. It could not eliminate the demographic or territorial dominance of English-speakers but it could represent a commitment to protect both cultures everywhere in Canada. Bilingualism is a tortured term in Canadian English. It has been subjected to many meanings and interpretations. Rarely has a word caused Canadians to ‘stutter’ more as individuals, organisations and government have tried to flesh out what it means in a practical sense. Bilingualism may refer to personal or organisational capacity; it may be territorial or personality based; it may be ‘official’ or informal. Within the public service it may imply the ability to serve the public in both languages, and it may mean building a workplace where members of either language community can work in their own language. In Canada it is almost always used to refer to French-English bilingualism, but many more Canadians are bilingual if other languages are taken into account. Many in English-speaking Canada feared that official bilingualism meant that every individual would have to know and use both languages. To many in French-speaking Canada it 8 symbolised the equality of the two founding European cultures in Canada. When it was twinned with biculturalism in the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism, many in Québec conflated it with bi-nationalism, but any attempt to move toward a ‘two- nation” theory of Canada was strongly opposed by a majority of English-speaking Canadians.